Uncle Cheney Wants You

Quote Of The Day

I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration; I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person humanized or de-humanized. If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)

Save Darfur - False Advertising?

A Darfuri woman in yet another perfectly staged photo shoot

Last week, the British Advertising Standards Authority upheld a claim brought by the European Sudanese Public Affairs Council (ESPAC) and against the Save Darfur Coalition, ruling that the Coalition's advertisements claims that 400,000 innocent people were slaughtered in Darfur was based on mere speculation and, thus, constituted false advertising.

The ESPAC’s evidence pointed out that of the various estimates of the numbers of deaths in Darfur, the US General Accountability Office had judged a study by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED), which is affiliated with the World Health Organisation, and not the study by the Coalition for International Justice, to be ‘the most objective and methodologically sound’. The CRED’s report, published in May 2005, estimated that 120,000 deaths were attributable to the conflict over a 17-month period, from September 2003 to January 2005. And these 120,000 deaths were not all amongst ‘innocent men, women and children’: they included deaths of combatants as well as violent deaths of civilians and deaths from malnutrition.

The ESPAC also put forward evidence to show that mortality rates have decreased in Darfur since 2005. It cited a report in the World Health Organisation’s Weekly Morbidity and Mortality Bulletin from 2006 which said that the number of excess deaths in Darfur had fallen below emergency levels. It also presented comments made by Jan Pronk, a UN Sudan Special Representative, who said that mortality and malnutrition rates had decreased dramatically after 2005, largely as a result of aid received and the setting up of refugee camps (5). This would mean that the Save Darfur Coalition’s adverts were shocking for two reasons: first, they were allegedly based on ‘deficient’ data; second, they were aimed at raising awareness about the ‘SLAUGHTER’ of an alleged 400,000 people at a time when the number of deaths in Darfur had fallen below emergency levels.

Should we be surprised that another attempt to justify the invasion of an oil rich Muslim country is based upon bullshit?

The Inflation Squeeze Is On

The Prime Rate

The Prime Interest Rate is the interest rate charged by banks to their most creditworthy customers (usually the most prominent and stable business customers). The rate is almost always the same amongst major banks. Adjustments to the prime lending rate are made by banks at the same time; although, the prime rate does not adjust on any regular basis.

It is adjusted when the Federal Reserve, a private corporation, says so.

Crashes, depressions, recessions, etc. do not just happen. A private corporation decides.

The Fed creates liquidity, then demands payment on margin calls, and when the inevitable consequence of consuming on debt predictably occurs, the Fed charitably "bailsout" the American consumer from the disaster the Fed created.

And Americans call this a free market. Laughable.

The True Rulers Of America

I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a monied aristocracy that has set the government at defiance. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs.

Thomas Jefferson

I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous

than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be

paid by posterity, under the name of funding,

is but swindling futurity on a large scale.

Thomas Jefferson

If the American people ever allow private banks to control

the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation,

the banks and the corporations which grow up around them will

deprive the people of all property until their children wake up

homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.

Andrew Jackson

Controlling our currency, receiving our public money, and
holding thousands of our citizens in dependence...would be
more formidable and dangerous than a military power of the enemy.

Andrew Jackson

Click here if you have 3 1/2 hours to receive a real education.

A City Without Billboards

In 2007, the world's fourth largest metropolis and Brazil's commercial capital, Sao Paolo, became the first city outside the communist world to put into effect a near-complete ban on outdoor advertising.

Can you imagine if only America's major cities started following suit? Have you ever paid attention to how much visual pollution there is on any given stretch of highway?

Think Outside The Bottle

As it turns out, the water in these bottles is the same water each one of us uses for our shower - TAP WATER.

Except that when water is taken from you and resold to you in environmentally-unfriendly, oil-wasting packaging, the mark-up is about 7000%. A half-liter of Pepsi's Aquafina at a Tucson convenience store costs $1.39. The bottle contains purified water from the Tucson water supply. From the tap, you can pour over 6.4 gallons for a penny.

You do the math.

In whose interest is it to convince you that tap water is not as good as bottled water even though, more often than not, it is actually the same thing? Read more here.